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Tamil Nadu ‘lottery king’ raided for tax evasion was labourer who built Rs 7,000-cr empire

Santiago Martin, known as 'Lottery King', was in the news this week as I-T officials raided 70 of his premises across India.

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Bengaluru: Lotteries are known to be fickle instruments, but they were the building blocks that helped Coimbatore native Santiago Martin become a billionaire at the helm of a Rs 7,000-crore empire.

Lottery King Martin”, as the businessman has come to be known, was in headlines this week as 70 of his premises across the nation were raided by the income tax (I-T) department over suspected tax evasion — 22 in Coimbatore, 10 in Chennai, 18 in Kolkata, five in Mumbai, three in Delhi, and two each in Hyderabad, Guwahati, Siliguri, Gangtok, Ranchi and Ludhiana.

But this was hardly the first brush with the law for Martin, a former daily-wage labourer who turned his penchant for lottery into a roaring business and is known to have powerful contacts.

Martin’s wheel of fortune

It was roughly 35 years ago that Martin left India, going over 4,700 km from home to find work as a labourer in Yangon, Myanmar.

During the time he spent there, he developed a passion for lottery and decided to start a two-digit lottery of his own. The idea clicked and Martin’s wheel of fortune began to turn.

In 1988, “Lottery King Martin” established his business in Tamil Nadu, naming his enterprise ‘Martin Lottery Agencies Ltd’. He moved his family back to India as well and settled in his hometown Coimbatore.

Although he primarily operated out of Tamil Nadu, his business soon had a presence in Karnataka and Kerala as well, where he gained permission to serve as a marketing agent, running the operation of lotteries run by state governments. Lottery was made illegal in Tamil Nadu by late chief minister Jayalalithaa in 2003.

The Northeast was the next frontier, and he was soon handling government lottery schemes in Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, and Manipur besides Punjab and Maharashtra, where lotteries are legal and often used by local administrations to boost revenues. Martin eventually established a monopoly over lottery operations in most of these states.

Over the years, he is also said to have also forged a good relationship with the Bhutanese and Nepalese governments, where he is the sole distributor of lottery tickets.

The first major instance of conflict with law came in 2011, when the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered 32 cases against Martin and his associates for allegedly cheating the Sikkim government of Rs 4,500 crore.

According to the agency, starting 2005, Martin had sold lottery tickets worth Rs 4,752 crore on behalf of the Sikkim government in Kerala, but paid the state only Rs 143 crore.

In Kerala, the ‘lottery scandal’ kicked up a storm, forcing the Centre to ban the sale of Sikkim lottery tickets in the state for two years, starting 2012.

In 2014, after a detailed probe, the CBI claimed the scam was a front for money laundering.

An officer who worked closely with the case in Kerala said at the time that most of the winners had admitted to the CBI that they had bought Sikkim lottery tickets to convert their black money into white.


Also readI-T dept acts irrespective of political affiliations, finance ministry tells EC


Powerful contacts

The extent of Martin’s influence was at full display when allegations of the scam first emerged as he engaged senior Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi as his counsel.

Kerala’s Left Democratic Front (LDF) government criticised Singhvi’s appearance, saying he had the backing of the Congress high command. The Congress, left red-faced ahead of local panchayat and civic elections, subsequently forced Singhvi to withdraw from the case.

The roles were exchanged in a controversy two years earlier, in 2008, when it was reported that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) mouthpiece Deshabhimani was given Rs 2 crore by Martin, who was under investigation for tax evasion at the time.

The uproar that followed the revelations forced the paper to return the money.

Back home

Meanwhile, Martin seemed to have built a strong network in his home state, Tamil Nadu, as well. He was believed to be quite close to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), especially its late patriarch M. Karunanidhi. In 2011, he produced a Rs 20 crore Tamil movie called Ilaignan that was based on a story written by Karunanidhi.

When the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), then under the late Jayalalithaa, came to power in 2011, he was among several DMK leaders and sympathisers booked for various cases of fraud, among other offences. Martin alone was booked for his alleged role in over a dozen cases of illegal lottery sales and cheating.

In 2012, Martin was arrested by the Tamil Nadu police for his involvement in 14 cheating and land grab cases. He subsequently served eight months at the Vellore prison.

Whichever way the wind blows

If there is one thing Martin is said to have learnt over the years, it is to keep up with changing political dispensations.

In 2012, his wife Leema Rose Martin filed a police complaint against Karunanidhi’s daughter Selvi, alleging that two lottery agents, one of them close to the latter, had framed her husband in a fake lottery case.

Sources close to the Martin family say that the case, and its timing, was a strategic move.

While he was in jail, Leema began to establish herself as a powerful player in her own right, going on to become the Tamil Nadu vice-general secretary of the Indhiya Jananayaka Katchi (IJK), which joined hands with the BJP-led NDA just ahead of the 2014 parliamentary elections.

At an election rally in Coimbatore, Leema had even shared the dais with Narendra Modi, who was then the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. This had reportedly caused a lot of embarrassment to state BJP leaders.

The ‘other side’

While mostly in the headlines for the wrong reasons, Martin has also been known to step up for good causes.

When Cyclone Gaja hit Tamil Nadu in 2018, Martin donated Rs 5 crore to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister E. Palanisamy for relief work.

“Martin claims to be one of the highest individual income tax-payers in the country,” a Tamil Nadu-based IT official told ThePrint. “He belongs to what is called the ‘Super Tax Payer’ group. But he has also made copious amounts of contributions to disaster management efforts during Cyclone Vardah (2016) and the Chennai floods (2015),” the official added.


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4 COMMENTS

  1. The ‘rags to riches’ story of Martin starts from Myanmar, where he worked as a daily wage laborer. … He faces 32 cases of lottery fraud in Kerala alone

  2. Untill n unless reservation policy is adequately implemented in Higher Judiciary (H.C & SC) such incidents of bias will continue to happen. Fate of 85 percent citizens of India is decided by 15 percent caste Hindus, who still consider lower caste people as “NEECH”.

  3. Those who deny the existence of caste system in India are suffering from two types of blindness ; one of sight blindness and other of mental blindness.

  4. If you are against any kind of discrimination, then why do you all use use quota in govt. Exams when you have all the facilties a general has.? Merit should be deciding factor unless you are a BPL.
    Hypocrisy is the new fashion in India where people and channels and editors publish their own views , without knowing what really the reason could be. PLEASE STOP USING YOUR QUOTA WHEN YOU KNOW YOU HAVE THR MERIT, AND THEN PLEASE COMPLAINT AGAINST THE PM.

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